Words for Flying High and Coming Down

Hawk over Angels Gate, closest I can come to a flying image at the moment

This is a first for me -- a blog from 30,000 feet. In seat 22C on a Delta flight east, coming back to Flint from LA on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday. It's my first time to encounter WiFi in a jet. As I noted on FaceBook, I'm not sure if this is good or bad...usually, being free from email and other electronica for four hours in the air means that these trips, my many commutes, are times when I've started new writing projects and read books I'd long neglected. Another zone of solitude changed. Instead, I'm cramped up in my teensy seat, my elbows scrunched back against the inadequate cushion, the laptop on the tray table. Not an empty seat. They've finished beverage service and most people are asleep including, blessedly, the infant two rows up in 20F who bawled the whole way over the Rockies. I'd bawl too, actually -- tough way for a baby to spend four hours, not to mention her harried mommy and daddy.

And beverage service: let's see. Now we are told via not so kindly intercom that we can only have ONE packet -- peanuts, pretzels or cookies -- and we should be thinking about it ahead of time. We still get free juice, water or coffee, but the booze is $7. I learned long ago I'm better off not drinking up here in the high clouds, so I save myself that expense. But I studiously select a package of peanuts, issuing my decision quite responsibly when the old ladies (they're all close to my age these days) rumble the cart down the aisle. I buy a sandwich for $8 -- turkey, provolone and greens of some sort in an oversized bun. I shouldn't eat all of it, but I feel sorry for myself, trapped up here. No cash anymore: credit card only...so I have to twist myself around the tray table, dig my backpack out from under my seat with my feet, do a perverted yoga bend to unzip the outside pocket, pry out my wallet, get the ELGA debit card, and hand it over...the flight attendant slices it through a little holstered box and declares me paid. I ask for a couple of extra napkins to sop up the bad balsamic vinaigrette dressing and that is what I get -- exactly two flimsy leafs of napkin, as insubstantial as onion skin.

Oh, did I mention Ted got upgraded to First Class? So he's up there enjoying free everything, the bastid, stretched out in his capacious seat, wiping off the angst and sweat spreading like a cloud of Agent Orange from back here in steerage. Oh, no, the kid just woke up. She's not happy. I know why. My ears are telling me -- we're coming down. Coming down indeed.

The Next New Thing at Airport Security: Palms Up

The two men in blue gloves, sort of kindly jocular but serious too, pull me off the line and say, “excuse me, ma’am, we have to check your hands.” “This is new,” I say, curious but there can’t be any joking, not even an evident curiosity, not even the slightest question, so I quickly divert my eyes and fix my face not to reveal itself, its interest in the notion of putting my hands out, palms up, to strangers. I think about how I think I look – clearly a 60-year-old woman, with gray hair at the roots, my hair pulled back; I’m wearing my black tunic with rainbow embroidery on it and my black yoga pants underneath; I’ve dressed for comfort in coach, but I’ve also picked my clothes to feel like “me,” like this woman who travels, who’s kind of interesting. I’ve got my favorite California necklace on, a circle of reassuring polished stones, with earrings to match, and I feel earthy and seasoned. Anyway, they make me reach my hands out, palms up, and one of the men brushes a brush over the soft pads at the base of the fingers, the crease of my lifeline, a brush attached to a tube attached to a machine. For just a moment there’s a weird intimacy, the palms of my hands, the two men, the machine – and I stand there and they turn their back and look at the machine. “It just takes seven seconds,” they say, like when you get a mammogram, like when the kind woman ducks off out of the room to avoid the radiation and you have to hold your breath and you wonder if there’s something dark and scary inside your most beloved part, the part that never got to suckle a child but that your husband loves and says so often, and then the machine stops and she says, okay, and comes back in and takes off the plates to see what’s there, to see if you moved and your breast left its mark or if you maybe moved and there’s the slightest blur, the blur of your body saying, no, no, don’t know this thing about me. Anyway, the seven seconds go by and I’m standing there with my arms still raised, my palms still up, and I'm balancing on my whole feet, the way I practice in yoga, feeling my toe mounds and my heels solid against the floor, grounding themselves and my chi or whatever you call it right down into the earth's core, and then the men say, "Okay, you’re okay," and I put my palms down, wondering what it would be like to have a bitter explosive on my skin, sabotaging crystals, instead of just the anxious pink airport soap and the knowing epidermis of my whole beloved life of touching and holding things and I head to Gate 2 and my next short-term escape.

Bicoastal Blues

What does it mean, really, to have the kind of life that shuttles me back and forth with regularity from one latitude -- the one with not enough sun, Vit. D or youth, the one just a few miles south of the halfway point between the equator and the n. pole -- and another -- the one with sea and cliff and rainbows of color and too damn many people and cars and overstimulation?

Here I go again, embedded in the airport part of my life, competing in the NWA World Club for one of the chairs near a three-pronged plug, the chairs with black faux marble ovals that can be pulled out to support the computer. We all make a beeline (interesting metaphor -- will it become archaic if the bees die off, or, if the bees die off will we too, making it a moot metaphor?-- for these chairs which work very well, something like the desks with pull out armrests in college classrooms. Only for grownups who need and want extra padding for our derrieres. People graze the ever diminishing choices of snacks up here in the "club" you have to pay for, where the frosted glass doors swing open at your approach and you have to show a card and drivers' license. It's a luxury to be up here, maybe shameful in these times, but I don't feel apologetic. I paid for my membership and Ted's with the honest work of my "pen," my cursor, my Puritanical drive. Didn't charge it. Didn't get a bailout from the U.S. Government for it. Don't fly my private jet anyplace for any reason.

And we upgraded, using precious miles accumulated from our air peripatetic life, to first class. Another luxury I crave and want and want and want -- more space, more privacy, select access to the tiny bathroom (only 20 people or so use the lst class loo) and a flight attendant for only us..."would you like the croissant or the pasta?" "Would you like some more hot tea?" Sometimes they call you by name, from their little lst class chart. "Ms. Worth, would you like a blanket?"

We arrange these comforts, at some cost to ourselves and with the more-than-a-twinge of moral upbraiding that accompanies our mutually guilt-freighted upbringings -- Ted's Catholic childhood in Brunswick, Maine, my Protestant rectitudes of mid-Ohio -- out of a kind of desperate need for safety, space -- the distances we have to traverse to sustain our chosen unusual life large and long. It is sometimes confusing but we do it out of love and commitment -- and a dogged primal drive to protect ourselves and cosset ourselves in the unnatural realm of planes and flying at 38,000 feet -- for love.

Two glum poems from a hard winter

Perhaps the entry below will explain the sinister tone of these verses.

1. Winter Solstice, LA: Arrival

It’s dark here too, but wet--
harbor lights oily and only
someone else’s news.
I’m sick,
panicked from
the claustrophobic flight, sinuses
squalling and squirming
like preemies -- no, like
poor harridans shriveled and brittle in
wheelchairs in a hospice ward.
Enough of that. Black waves spread out
in waning moonrise.
I missed full monty, and what’s left
Is less, is less, a lunar solstice
cringeing into soggy waxen dawn.

2. Coming Home: "Light Chop"

...the pilot says, dry and neutral, businesslike
as puffed up little bags of peanuts jiggle
on a flight attendant’s tray. Things change:
the Continental Divide’s the culprit, wreaking
waves on earth’s upheavals
and, six miles high my body's fill of air and water
settles toward my feet, ankles bad balloons wanting
a joyless drift to land. My ancient heart
flutters, querulous. (I use a fancy word
to soothe my fear) as clouds rise up and bump us--no,
we are going down into all that cumulus like
a congested head, sliding into a sinus infection
we call Detroit, just a light chop, he says,
to get us drained all out on frozen ground.

LA as Motherboard and an Iron Brace

In the harsh sun of midafternoon yesterday when we flew into LAX, Los Angeles looked less like the City of Angels than a giant repeated motherboard: metallic, unnatural, hard-edged, giving off a gun-silver glint that almost hurt the eyes. This is how it is: the intense compactions of the city's concrete grids, ending finally at the lip of ocean. From the air the strips of beach at Redondo looked thin, a meager, gritty skin, a line of inadequate sandbags barely serving in reverse to protect the ocean from rigidly rectangular encroachments of city.

It doesn't always strike me like that. Sometimes the first sight of a palm along Century Boulevard, let's say, where the airport hotels line up like fortresses for exhausted travelers, breaks up the landscape with a single flourish, the crown of green, and a person can sigh a little. But I couldn't find them, my tense neck bent to the jet's small window.

It took the full drive into San Pedro to begin to relax. We came with friends this time -- a couple who'd never flown and had never been to California. Their delight assuaged -- they noticed the smell of the air, its reliable saltiness -- what we quickly, predictably termed "refreshing." If salt is a preservative this LA scent is something to cling to. I thought there was also a whiff of smoke, whipped down from the summer's fires.

Having dinner at Port O' Call, we watched two species of survivors. Pelicans dove into the channel and a seal somersaulted in the olive-green water. A container ship glided out and we talked about the glut of containers: our friend Shane said he'd bought two of them for $1900 each, a bargain, for his Flint company. People could live in them, and do, he said, though at his company they efficiently store chemicals.

What is it that this place contains? Everything, I think. It is a motherboard of human production, a hard palette of accomplishment, craving, and aggressive detritus of the urge to flee -- from the history of "back there," for example -- to the east, the boring burgs of wherever we're "from," the hyper-charged energy, sometimes feverish, of starting over. Or maybe, I'm thinking, by now this interpretation of "California" is obsolete: the space for it, both intellectual and literal, might be...taken. Whatever it is, whatever we impose on this crowded canvas, it is cast in complex alloy. It's not so much what this place contains, but how it contains itself and us with it. The land feels trapped today, like a leg in an iron brace.

Climbing Steps in Quebec

Right now I'm hearing horses clip-clop by on Rue St. Anne in old Quebec City. We're at the Hotel Champlain and just got back from dinner at Marie Clairisse, a restaurant half-way down the stairs on one of QC's many ups and downs. We sat outside on a crowded little terrace and had sturgeon/mackerel appetizers, a bit of red wine, and entrees ranging from salmon steaks to lamb to bouillabaise. The breeze kicked up and blew all our cloth napkins into our faces. We all slammed our hands down and made sure the flask of merlot didn't tip over.

This is the summer of QC's 400th anniversary and the cobblestone streets are full of visitors, both French Canadian and English-speaking Canadian and Americans. It's very merry and picturesque.

We spent the day driving around Ile d'Orleans, the "Garden Island" in the St Lawrence Seaway. It's a high, fertile oval with an abundance of small towns, old churches and rocky beaches. At a little art gallery I bought two meticulous drawings by Nicole Ouellet, a Quebecoise. The drawings, of sunflowers and of a barn at the top of a hill in winter, touched me. We picnicked in a little gazebo, eating fresh pain, fraises et fromage, and later stopped at a chocolaterie.

On the return trip, we stopped at the Parc de la Chute -- Montmorency, where Audrey and I panted and moaned our way up 487 steps to get a great view of the 272-foot high waterfall, 100 feet higher than Niagara Falls. My thighs and knees, I readily admit, are aching. The air is crisp, fresh and breezy.

Now we're relaxing and Ralph and Ted are tellling stories about their mother Hazel, who, we all agree, must have been a hot number. They have a streak of French-Canadian in their blood, which makes them very good husbands.

There must be a poem in all this somewhere, but for the moment I'm not thinking about literary concerns. We're just eating, drinking, walking and sleeping. We keep stopping to take each other's pictures: I'm pretty sure we'll all look sun-kissed and grinning, but I don't have the cord to post any the shots yet. It's a good life. Bon soir.

Sam Thornton, the "French Balloonist" and my blue Granny

Ancestors' lives, all finished and receding, dangle out there like ornaments on a tree, the fragments of facts about their lives compelling and tantalizing.

Today I found out that my great great grandfather Samuel Thornton once sold an island in his property around Turkeyfoot Lake in Summit County, Ohio to a French balloonist. Actually, if I've got this right, it may have been Frank Purdy Lahm, an aviator and associate of the Wright brothers. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and educated in France. Or it might have been his father, who also had French connections.

Also, preparing for my visit with my second cousins Anne and Cyrus, I found among my mother's stuff a letter she received in October, 1924, when my mother was 14, from my great-grandmother Matilda Youtz, one of Samuel's many daughters. (It had a 2c stamp on it with a head of Washington) Grannie Youtz writes, among other things, "I get blue and lonesome about dark." An arrow to the heart. I recognize in that simple, plaintive confession a melancholy I know too well, the sadness of dusk. She was about 80 at the time.

She's considering taking in boarders and she writes, "enuf boys here for a room but all these night workers and I will not take them...no use for star boarders." Cyrus tells me there was so much factory work going on in Akron at the time some beds went to one man during the day, and to another at night. The "star boarders," he thinks, might have been so-called because they worked all night, under the stars.

The Here and Now is so much more complicated, the data pouring in from all directions, confusing and fluid. Yet, I find myself still turning back to what I know, what the senses have to offer. I'm still alive, unlike all those others, whom I thank for their idiosyncrasies and struggles, their stories.

Thunder and heavy rain, soothing.

P.S. Cousin Cyrus picked up the tab, very nimble at 91 in extending the courtly gesture. And yes, the gas was WAY more than the lobster.

The Go-Slow Club

Humid day when I have to drive in to work, I notice that people in the 25 mph section of Court Street actually are driving...25 mph. I'm in a lazy mood myself, but not THAT leisurely, so, surprised, I brake and pay attention. In the right lane, a rusty old New Yorker, a youngish white driver, long hair and a hat, with a big floppy yellow dog in the back seat. In the left lane, another rusty heap, an old Galaxy with three black teens, windows wide open, the kids' liberated elbows sticking out.

Me, sleepy, overweight, middle-aged woman in my 11-year-old Accord, in no hurry to get to the Castle of Learning. The other drivers wouldn't know, of course, but I got this car in my long-ago divorce and it's about to hit 90,000 miles. It's comfy and familiar. I'm in no rush to replace it -- it runs fine and it's been paid off for years. Just spent $45 to fill it up -- $4.07/gal. So, I'm in my Michigan Radio cap and I'm slouching behind sunglasses just to hide even though it's thickly overcast. Trying to get ahead of a family history toward macular degeneration. Righteous because I ate steelcut oatmeal with almonds and raspberries for breakfast, trying to get ahead of a family history of colon cancer. Reflecting gloomily on mortality because my dear friend's mother Virginia is dying in a hospice at this very moment: in these last days blind, practically wordless and still remarkably durable, she lives on and on, each hour a painstaking grain of sand draining inexorably out, my friend exhausted at her bedside, while just outside politics and spring mindlessly continue.

So I don't care if we all go slow. I'm willing to take my time. As we angle from lane to lane, puttering along, it hits me the other two probably are driving slowly to save gas. Nobody ever goes the speed limit on Court Street; people usually dart from lane to lane, shooting ahead if anybody dares to dawdle, honking, gesturing, giving the stink eye. Not today. I think my mates on Court are maximizing every drop. More out of sociability than any need to speed, I slowly move into the "fast" lane behind the teens. I pull up next to the guy in the rusty New Yorker. I'm ready to give him a smile but he stares obliviously ahead. The dog, though, grins happily and gives out a little woof.

And I savor this sappy moment of fondness for everybody in the human race, beleaguered and constantly adjusting. But most of all, I'm fond of this communitarian crowd who might be slowing down. I like it like this.

Yeah, yeah, I'm back. So what?

Hard Stuff in Cheboygan

This week I loved my life, even its bedevilments of memory and sadness triggered by retracing old paths. I want to praise the "mutilated world" in the words of Adam Zagajewski, and I am grateful for the blessings of language. Driving the 280 miles north up I-75 on Thursday, I found myself marking treasured mileposts: the three "G's" -- Gladwin, Grayling, Gaylord -- the 45th parallel, halfway between the Equator and the N. Pole, the turnoff for Hartwick Pines, where some of the oldest trees in the country still majestically survive. Then there's the exit for Topinabee and Cheyboygan, where my first husband and I used to get off 75 in our dash for the ferry from Cheyboyan to the property we once owned on Bois Blanc Island. It is hard not to reflect on the past, a past refusing to behave itself, an incorrigible past which sometimes still insists on nosing back into the present.

So, I did not successfully resist the flood of memory from those years. We used to have to leave at about 6:30 a.m. to make a 10:30 ferry, as I recall it. After pounding up the highway at about 90, keeping an eye out for tricky cops in the piney byways, I remember once making it to the parking lot just in time to meet two old friends who were joining us for a camping trip. I see us standing there in the morning dampness trying to catch our breath, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee spiked with whiskey from a green thermos. Man, I was younger then and could get away with such deliberate self-abuse and cherished decadence. I remember the gray water of the Straits, rippling and melancholy, and maybe some mallards or the occasional cormorant gliding up past the pier. I think we liked ourselves standing there in that parking lot enjoying strong drink in the morning, waiting for the ferry. I mourn the passing of that particular self-conscious wildness. I'm healthier now but less interesting to myself -- I suppose that is one of the disadvantages of growing up. Perhaps I simply haven't cultivated enough of a taste for moral and intellectual complexity -- pleasures available to an aging mind as the body retreats from the turbulent exertions of youth.

Now that I think of it, that's the moment I wanted to see again, from all the memories of my trip north -- the four of us huddled in a parking lot in the fresh and evocative Michigan fog, cracking wise, downing slugs of hard stuff, and waiting for the boat that would take us across the Straits to our next adventure.

Big Mac Always Bigger Than This

Last weekend at Interlochen, in a panel titled "Five Things I Know," Keith Taylor said "art is always bigger than our definition of it." The same could be said of the breathtaking Mackinac Bridge. No matter how many times I see this span across the Straits, its splendor always delivers and is hard to capture in pixels. Here it is just this morning from the north side. It was chilly in Bridge View Park at 11 a.m., an hour after I'd left Sault Ste. Marie. Yesterday when I shot up from Flint, there were still piles upon piles of ice chunks in the straits, something I had never seen in my many years as a Down Stater. But remarkably, over night most of them either melted or moved on.

Ain't Got No Euros

One of those Flint "backwater" moments.
This morning, in a burst of Monday ambition, I popped out of bed on a hunt for euros. My sister-in-law is going to Italy for her birthday and I thought it would be fun to send her a few euros: I know the exact piazza she'll be hanging out at in Rome, the one right in front of the Pantheon. I wanted her to have a couple of espressos on me.

Called my credit union. NO WAY, NO EUROS.

Called two banks: in addition to sounding incredulous that I wanted some euros, they said I had to order them and there would be a several-day wait.

Called what's supposed to be Flint's best hotel: clueless and apparently lead-poisoned.

I settled for express-mailing her a Franklin in her birthday card. Happy Birthday, Gail!

A Hole in my Socks on the Ides of March

Can't think of a single betrayal tonight. Home alone, done grading, a glass of merlot after lamb chops, little red potatoes and asparagus. Feet up, a tiny hole apparent on the left big toe of my favorite socks -- the ones with dogs on them I bought with my niece on a happy day in Frankenmuth.

Ah, the pleasures of faux Bavaria. That day, as we walked by one of the chicken palaces, a guy who seemed to have had a bit too much lager checked us out and said, "Hey...mother and daughter, right?" I was deeply affected.

So maybe this entry is something about childbearing -- not childbearing. As of Jan. 15, I'm officially "post-menopausal," having had no blood for a year, and now, more. My reproductive years are over.

Of course, I never reproduced. For women like me, who've never had babies, menopause carries, I believe, a somewhat different significance. Never having had children can be a hard disappointment. I remember when I first realized I probably wouldn't ever have kids. I was in my late thirties and I'd just had a miscarriage -- as far as I ever got. I stood in front of my kitchen window, staring out at the trees at that many-paned window of another life, and I couldn't stop crying. It was the first time I faced down one of the major limits of my life. I would not experience childbirth. I would not be a mother.

Perhaps the traitor du jour is my own body.

It's the "not" of it that aches, I suppose. The words that go with it are sad and empty. Barren is one of them. A womb that has never expanded, a womb that has never experienced "quickening." I was never "blessed among women." I will not, at my deathbed, have my children around me, as I once wrongly predicted in one of my Tonga journals. I am likely to die alone, as do we all when it comes down to it. It is what it is.

But those sad years of grieving over what was not to be are mostly over. I am not unhappy. Here it is Saturday night and I'm at ease and at liberty, feeling only a little sad about that hole in my sock, the little damage that reminds me that living has results: hurts and disappointments and yes, betrayals. And the daily discovery that emptiness can be filled up with love. I've had twenty years, since that first day of mourning, to fill up the empty spaces, to cultivate the "what else."

And here is the moment, the present tense, the breath in the now. Gratitude for what is: for what still is. No knife in the back. No cramps, no blood. No kid to keep me awake, no kid to ratify or indict me. No begats to hasten my demise. Just this quiet evening, fingers on keyboard, pixels organizing themselves into various dances at my touch. This, to my retiring womb, feels very lucky indeed on an unlucky day.

Ten Pound Hairball, a Coney Killer, a Cleaver and a Combine

Okay, I'm not kidding, I just heard a "report" on CNN about a woman who had a 10-pound HAIR BALL removed from her stomach. I swear, they even had a photo of it. How could Tony Harris keep a straight face? How could this happen? Was she eating it? Did she ever make any of those "ack-ack-ack" sounds my old cat Tater used to make when he'd get a (comparatively) petite furball caught in his gullet? Oh, man I'm glad I'm at least four hours from my Thanksgiving dinner. What a gross out.

Guess it's a Slow News Day.

And not only that, how about that "coney island" shooter in Lincoln Park (Okay, let's just say it's Detroit since Dee-Twah has just been named the "most dangerous city in America" by Congressional Quarterly. So, Kastroit Mydini went in through the back door of the Dix Coney Island, dressed, one of the survivors said, like "The Marlboro Man" in a long black coat and cowboy hat. He pulled out an AK47 and shot two people, killing the cook, Shpetim Maliqoski and wounding a waitress. The story seemed complicated -- he was looking for his ex-girlfriend, apparently; the cook's involvement is murky.

To take the story straight into Raymond Carver country, Mydini then fled in his sister's Lexus and, after a chaotic police chase, ran into a 60,000 pound combine harvesting sunflower seeds. Mydini was dead at the scene. In what was left of the trunk, police found the AK47, three samurai-style swords, a meat cleaver, a hatchet, a carving knife and two fake handguns.

Meat cleaver? FAKE handguns? Who, as I often tell my students, needs fiction? Apparently the decision by our august Supreme Court to consider the D.C. handgun ban is just the tip of the iceberg of our national insanity. What else will they need to consider to rescue us from our absurdities and pathologies?

In case you're wondering how I know all this fabulous information (coneys, combines and fake handguns are just about enough to make my day, so to speak), Ted and I are sitting in the Northwest Airlines World Club at Detroit Metro airport awaiting our connecting flight to Portland ME for Thanksgiving. We're staying in the Captain Daniel Stone Inn and hoping Augustine, the major domo of the adjoining eatery, will save us some stuffing and cranberry sauce. So far, it's a fun day. Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Touchy Feely Nixon

The gift shop is the only refuge for irony, the only acknowledgement of an immense pop culture legacy at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda -- there, you can buy mugs with photos of the 37th president bowling and a mouse pad showing him shaking hands with Elvis Presley. You can buy little tins of "Presidential Peppermints." You can pick up 50s-style coin purses, those soft rubber yonnis, amusingly sexual, that you open by squeezing open a slot at both ends -- they say "Nixon" in red, white and blue. You can get "Highly scented First Lady Travel Candles" and my favorite, under the label "1600 for men," a jar of "Power Muscle Soak" bath beads bearing the presidential seal.

But as soon as you walk into the cool capacious lobby, past a plaque recognizing creepily echoing names like Mrs. Charles G. (Bebe) Rebozo and Robert Aplanalp, you know that the Nixon library is about warm and fuzzy reconsiderations of history, about rehabilitation, about compassion for the dark and star-crossed Quaker prince.

Disturbingly, it works. Diving into the Nixon story, the way it's told in Yorba Linda, upended my blase hostility, unquestioned since the youthful certainties of my generation's righteous Sevenities indignations about Watergate.

I didn't want to go. I never would have gone there, but for the entreaties of our visitors this week, a pair of lively young academics. One was still in diapers during Watergate and the other wasn't even born. They shamed us into chauffeuring them 40 miles from San Pedro's cool breezes by gently insisting that they "wanted to know." My resistance to submerging into that grim time seemed shallow at best.

As one of my companions noted, all the docents look like Pat Nixon -- they are kind and solicitous and stiffly proper, eager to talk about Pat's rose garden and the reproduction of Nixon's favorite White House space, the cozy Lincoln Room, complete with his favorite slouchy brown chair. There is no mention of the moniker "Tricky Dick," no mention of that infamous First Dog Checkers, no mention of the good cloth coat, no audio clip of "I am not a crook."

Instead, a wall of framed letters from kids after Nixon's 1960 defeat to the much-hated JFK. From eight-year-old Bob Fahlstom of Evanston IL, "I feel very sorry that you lost. I'm a small Republican. I beat my brains out working for you." From Debbie Rathbun, age 7, "Dear Mr. Nixon..."Don't feel too bad, our class voted 23-8 for you. So you're still the president of Room 16." From James G. Mead, Age 7 ("but wish I was 21,"): Dear Nixon Your debates are the best. I think Kennedy is a hothead and he fell you with a lot of balony."

There is a bizarre mural by Hungarian artist Ferenc Daday, ironically a perfect example of a Soviet-era propaganda poster, depicting Nixon at Andau in 1956 after the Hungarian revolution. In the center, Nixon in a beige trench coat pats the head of a small girl who reaches up to him with a sprig of flowers. There are peasants leaning toward him, a triptych of women weeping in the background. The accompanying plaque says that during Nixon's visit, "he stayed up all night riding in a haywagon pulled by a tractor as he accompanied the freedom fighters on their rounds through the countryside to search for others who had escaped the Soviet crackdown."

Weirdly, it's believable. This same man who'd made a name for himself on HUAC, jubilantly nailing that commie Alger Hiss from Whittaker Chamber's pumpkin papers, believed that freedom from Communism was the great good, the all-consuming goal. He had a certain naive purity.

As has been widely noted, the Watergate section itself, remarkably, has been totally torn out. In that hallway, instead, are white walls randomly splashed with olive drab paint, some of it leaving long, morose drips. The exhibit was gutted in March by order of Timothy Naftali, the library's first federal director, a Harvard-trained historian. The action is part of a major change from being a privately run facility — the only modern presidential library not part of the federal system — to an institution run by the National Archives. The federal librarians had long known the earlier Watergate version was a whitewash, and perhaps their new attempt to document the story will wrestle more honorably with truth.

Most powerfully for me, Nixon's tormented guilt and the narrative of his doomed ascent from a struggling rural childhood, makes George W. Bush seem even more banal, more shameful, more infuriating. The library is situated on the 9 acres of Frank Nixon's original homestead -- the house, a small, tidy cottage that looks like something out of Bedford Falls, can be toured, and there's a big California pepper tree that Frank himself planted in about 1912 -- all seemingly part of that hopeful American dream, the hardscrabble Nixon family running their market, hanging together at the death of Richard's little brother Arthur. At his worst, Nixon spoke clearly and passionately, evincing a complex intelligence. His fall is all the more awful because of where he started -- not entitled to anything, not the smug beneficiary of wealth or connection. If you're looking for it, there's a vein of horrific implication about what this means in the Nixon library -- a Horatio Alger story that ends up wrong, a reverse image of a Mr. Smith Goes To Washington tale in which the individual's corruption and failure is unsparingly public and cruel.

Of course he deserved it. But it feels like something different from the cynical and doggedly unapologetic and presumptuous abuses of power at work today in the depressing presidency of Royal George.

" I think Nixon was a sad and pathetic man," one of my young companions remarked on our last swoop through the gift shop. I groaned and reluctantly agreed.

Personally, confronted with those glum walls in the scoured Watergate hallway and what their hard silence implied, even after contemplating the nostalgic Nixon home, even after breathing in the perfume of yellow roses (like an aerosol can in a bathroom, maybe?) I still wanted to deface something, draw a big peace symbol onto the blank whiteness or scrawl, "Nixon lied." I had my hand in my bag, reaching for a pen. My husband stopped me -- for my own good. He was right. I'm pretty sure there were cameras everywhere. Even without the catharsis of graffiti, I had to face the facts, so to speak: the telling of even the darkest history is always changing.

Oh, No, Not New York

So I'm sitting with Ted over late breakfast at Tom's Coney Cafe on Dort Highway, dreading New York. I'm eating a turkey and swiss croissant and drinking a decent cup of coffee and reading, ironically, the New York Times -- one of our daily treats from (she lowers voice to a whisper) the corner Starbucks. There's an article about how Lou Dobbs doesn't tell the truth -- particularly when it comes to leprosy in the U.S. Apparently he said there were 7,000 cases in the last three years -- mostly perpetrated by those pesky immigrants -- when really, it was 7,000 cases over the last THIRTY years. Confronted with his statistical creativity by David Leonhardt of the Times, along with suggestions Dobbs has been offering broadcast exposure to white supremacists, Dobbs replied, "You've raised this to a level that frankly I find offensive." Funny how raising the level of something can be offensive.

A big glamorous black woman comes in and Ted says, "Is that LaKisha?" We're on the lookout since she rolled into Bishop Airport Sunday night. Don't know if she favors these Dort Highway dives, but we're at home here. A roly-poly guy in the booth next to us orders a "Jy-Roe" and the waitress impatiently corrects, "HEE-Row." I can almost hear her say, "HEE-row, dumbell." "Okay, HEE-row," he tolerantly repeats, "Whatever, gimme one." I like a place like that. Two guys in Harley teeshirts amble in and order platters of two coneys each, even though it's barely past breakfast. I think the slim young woman in a nearby booth, chain smoking and rather wearily done up in a wide metal belt, short skirt and tight top, might have come off the circuit further down the road. We're all in this together.

So anyway, even though I'm enjoying my New York Times amid the comforting dishevelment of my Flint brothers and sisters, I'm dreading the actual city of New York. Friday morning Ted and I are jumping a jet to Newark airport, plopping down in our overpriced room at the Roosevelt Hotel, and enduring three days at Book Expo America.

I'll be one of 30,000 authors, publishers, agents, booksellers, scam artists and hangers-on competing for space in the aisles of the Jacob Javits Convention Center. The number of booths are in the thousands. Among other rules, they say bookbags on wheels are forbidden, for some reason.

It's a trade show, the business end of the deal -- and I've decided it is time I abandon my fantasy life of grassy, nurturing artist colonies and rambling ruminations on line breaks and symbolic intent for the bottom line.

My book will be displayed a couple of places, a single dandelion in an overpopulation of weeds (weeds are wildflowers by another name, right?) and I'm supposed to find out if I win, show or place in the ForeWord Magazine Literary Novel of the Year Award (for the record, there are something like 40 rubrics and 650 finalists...only ten, however, in my category). I don't think I'll win: a fancy-schmancy Solzhinetsyn collected and a reissue of a novel with a new foreward by Wole Soyinka are the front-runners, I predict. ForeWord has found a brilliant way to cater to all us independently published authors desperate for exposure; yes, I bought the gold-embossed "Finalist" sticker for my book. Fifty-five dollars, if you must know.

Then I'm recording a podcast at the iUniverse booth: five minutes, five questions. Then Ted and I are going to try to snag autographs from the likes of Wilbur Smith and Alan Alda. I'm going to fight for a front-row seat at an interview with Christopher Hitchens and have breakfast on Sunday with Ian McEwen and a couple of hundred of his other best friends.

It's just that I'll feel so...small.

Just one little Flintoid with half a foot in LA, treading into Gotham City with all the rest of those rabid writer/aspirants. Oh, the horror.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Feelin bettah, ain't dead yet

Coming out of a tunnel of spring sickness and grateful to feel human again. It hit both of us at our beautiful bed and breakfast in Bellaire three weeks ago: last good night was that luxurious soak in the jacuzzi and the eucalyptus massage that followed. Oh, sweet Jeezus.

But we paid a price: our smiling pores opened up so big they apparently took in the worst infection of the season, and we were laid up for days (and not in a fun way). The day after the jacuzzi, before we realized how bad off we were going to be, I made my husband drive me up to the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula: I was bound and determined to see the Grand Traverse Lighthouse and have lunch at Boone's in Sutton's Bay. When we got to the lighthouse we both had serious chills and sniffling, and the low point was my poor patient man had to pee in a frigid outhouse.

Things to note: 1. WHY does the gift shop at the lighthouse use plastic bags? Don't they know it takes a thousand years for these suckers to biodegrade -- if ever?

2. WHY does the B&B (otherwise fabulous in all respects) offer Ice Mountain bottled water? Haven't they heard about the water table deterioration, attributed to this company, in their very own neighborhood?

More later. This is just to say I'm back and okay.

When It Began, A Foreboding Day in New York

Four years of madness. I was at 4Cs in New York City in 2003 when it was all beginning. What have we done?

VERNAL EQUINOX, 2003, New York City

Light and dark are supposed to be equal
but today in the caverns of New York
darkness seems to have the edge.

Across from my thirteenth floor room
CNNS's unlucky strobe flickers in every
office cube. I pull the red drapes shut.

I'm here to give a paper on failure, bad
joke. For airport safety, no laptop: revising
words come hard to the yellow pad. My pen

leaks blue splotches on my hand, blots
the insufficient page. My head's congested
from the half-empty flight, the ride through

Lincoln Tunnel, where guardsmen stood with guns.
In every elevator, tiny TVs report first casualties
while we stand, hypnotized and horrified, waiting

for doors to open. Tanks like buffalo graze
haunted sand, the only green the spooky network
night lights. We get on, we get off, brass doors closing

at our backs. I drink green tea and try to concentrate,
turn to books I brought for comfort: Rilke and
Marquez: "It was inevitable" -- again and again --

"the scent of bitter almonds." Then, a loud crash,
right here in New York. I run to the window, push
open the drapes, my heart a panicky fist. But

below, people walk unfazed, the busy night trade
seemingly unchanged. And then another boom,
and I understand it's thunder -- simply thunder

and a stun of lightning, and then
a deluge of rain, tarnished silver,
heavy and streaking the high windows.


(Thanks to Dunes Review, where this first appeared)

Pentimento on M-10

I don't often go north from Flint in winter. Thursday I did, traveling alone to Ferris State for a conference. Driving those roads gets me melancholy, thinking about my first husband. He spent blue collar summers up there and the scrubby lots and pines in rows and brown rivers all touched his heart and filled his poetry. Used to be the only time I'd go up there was with him, waiting watchfully for the sweet sadness to descend on him around Evart. I loved that part of him. Remembering his love for white birches doesn't go away with the end of marriage, now six years past.

But one lays down new memories, even in old territories, a pentimento. Is that the word? I look it up. Oh, man, yes, that's what I mean. Rooted in the Italian for "repent, " the artist changing his mind, painting over that hand that didn't look right, making the eyes turn another way, reangling the troublesome feet, paint over paint. Regret and trying again.

So, my trip a pentimento. MapQuest took me up 75 to M-10, as usual -- 85 miles an hour easy all the way to that cool rest stop at Clare with the cast iron sculptures and the good bathrooms. But after that, M-10 narrows down to a two-lane and if you've got any sense you take a deep breath, not try to pass every pickup or old Dodge, and just pay attention.

Going west in the late afternoon, I hit ochre sunset slanting off wide fields of snow. The brown this time of year is beautiful, every twig limned and distinct, every hawk feather, it seemed to me, sharply visible in the clear late winter air, shadows of the stone houses and outbuildings extending halfway back to the fenceposts, the stiff remains of cutdown cornstalks elegant contrast to sensuous curves of snow.

Last week when I flew back to Michigan from California, gloomy and resistent to my all-too-familiar Midwest, the view from the air after the Mississippi River was like a reverse Wizard of Oz, stunning change from technicolor to black and white -- or brown and white, really -- a shock of subtraction. But driving into the sunset the other day on the old roads, thinking about a lost marriage and heading toward something new and good, the land seemed rich and textured and full of lovely subtlety again.

Memories of Wendy's Manicure and Al Murray Shoes Make Me Happier in Cold Flint

Cantankerous this Wednesday back in Flint, 14 degrees with two inches of fresh snow on the ground, and I don't find it amusant. The second day of jet lag almost always the worst. So I draw a big deep bubble bath and sink in decadently. Remembering Jim Harrison's recent eminently sensible prescription for what ails ya: a huge porterhouse, a quart of the best bourbon you can afford and a long hot bath, then sleep for a day. But I gotta be at work in an hour. So, wrapped in Ted's big heavy white robe, the most I can get of Ted who's still back in San Pedro, I crank up Sam Cooke belting Change is Gonna Come, and after that, the Overture from the Marriage of Figaro, and after that, Harry Nillson wailing "Down." Aggressive and loud. I'm feeling slightly better, but don't catch me admitting it. Anyway, it's not even 9 a.m. yet.

By the way, Harrison's Returning to Earth is my favorite recent novel. I dig the way his main character dies midway, walking into his own freshly dug grave in Canada, dreaming of ravens and bears. And when I tried to post the cover for a little variety in the paragraph, Safari crashed and I had to start this all over. Must be crow magic in the air.

Anyway, two memories of Pedro warm me this day. There's a Vietnamese manicure place in a little mall off 25th where I always go when I'm there -- they're fast and friendly. I love the sound of the Vietnamese language bubbling around me in that room; to my ear, it's like frogs on a summer night, or water tumbling over rocks, or hens murmuring -- whatever, it's a lovely cacaphony. Wendy, a delicate woman with delicate hands, took on my Ohio paws, which looked huge resting on her table. I asked for the oil manicure and added the paraffin wax, and then she wondered if I'd like a flower on one of the nails. It's not my usual, but I said yes only so that I could watch her create the tiny white flower with four petals and a perfect stem on my left ring finger. Then she glued a tiny jewel in the center, and then she created a corresponding one on the other hand. This doesn't "look like me," but I loved them, and I loved watching her ply her remarkable craft, and they lasted for a week.

The second warming memory had to do with buying shoes. Ted wanted to buy a new pair of New Balance sneakers, and we went to Al Murray Shoes off Western Ave. in Pedro. The service was so great I decided to buy a pair myself. We spent 45 minutes there, the clerk lovingly measuring our feet, leisurely talking to us about our feet (I'm serious -- I've never had any shoe clerk do this) and making suggestions for the best shoes for us. He said my poor aging arches are falling and that can lead to back aches and headaches and all kinds of other malaise -- "The feet," he said passionately, "the feet affect everything." When we put on the shoes he selected, complete with arch-supporting inserts, we walked around the place feeling 20 years younger, floating like angels, while he beamed at us. Then he gave us a good talking to: "you must walk," he said. "Forty-five minutes a day. You must sweat." We nodded compliantly. "You'll feel so much better, and now you have the right shoes for it." I felt so...loved. What a pleasure!

So I'll put on my blissfully good fitting sneakers and stride out into this frigid day.